I’m certain that we’ve concluded in a past thread that we have the same first name, and I get the same thing; everyone always wants to spell it with a “c”! For years, I either spell my name out immediately, or I’ll say “FirstName, with a K” when asked my name. It gets a little more complicated when I also have to give my last name, because while it is spelled with a “C”, the first syllable is pronounced as “K” (kay)!!
So it’s “FirstName, with a K, LastName, with a C” when the rest of the world wants to write it “FirstName with a C, LastName with a K!” I get more bothered by the last name being misspelled than the first one, though.
I also have half the people I meet wanting to put an accent on the first letter of my first name, since that’s the most common pronunciation of it in French. I just let them do it, it doesn’t really bother me much!
This sort of thing annoys me no end. It’s not the computer’s fault it cannot be programmed flexibly. This is pure laziness on the part of humans, somewhere in the organization. The machine ought to do the work to make peoples’ lives easier, not the other way around.
I’m not a fan of hyphenated names at all. Most of them sound and look stupid. A family should have one name. I can see why some women aren’t happy about taking their husband’s name, but that’s tradition for you. I wonder if in 30 years or so we are going to see a Smith-Jones marry a Johnson-Baker, and have kids with the name of Smith-Jones-Johnson-Baker. At some point couples are just going to have to compromise.
I always changing one’s name upon marriage was all kinds of bizarre, and now that I work in databases, I think it’s annoying as shit on top of it.
-Troy McClure SF, whose last name is actually McClure and therefore understands that sometimes it’s other people who shit themselves when presented with a slightly strange name
I assumed the same when my sister got married and had kids. She hyphenated her name (i.e., Sister Jones-Smith, Smith being her husband’s surname), and I assumed (based on other hyphenated folks I know) that her kids were hyphenated as well.
Boy, was I wrong.
After oh, about 4 years of my sending gifts to her twins, addressed with the hyphenated last name, my sister came all outta the blue and chewed me a new one, saying that my use of hyphenation with her kids’ names INFURIATED her husband, because the children bore his - and ONLY his - last name. She also implied that I’d been hyphenating for the specific purpose of pissing him off.
Wha . . . ? Could she not have told me this (in a calmer, more rational manner) before?
OK, so I started addressing goodies for the kids with only my BIL’s last name, and all has been (pretty much) well for the last couple of years.
This Christmas, however, my husband and I got a Christmas card, addressed by my sister’s husband*, to “SkipMagic and Auntie EM [Skip’s Last Name]”
Well.
That is most certainly NOT my name. I kept my own last name when we got married; no hyphen, nothin’. Just the same last name I’ve had since birth.
And while normally I don’t give a hoot if someone addresses me by Skip’s last name, in this case I had to resist a strong urge to call my sister and tell her that I was INFURIATED by her husband’s incorrect use of MY name.
(It helps that I think her husband’s an ass.)
So anyway, to answer the OP . . . no, hyphenating does not bug me, and I try my best to call people whatever they want to be called; however, count me as one of those people who will never truly understand (despite WhyNot’s reasonable and articulate explanation) why anybody gets his/her panties all in a twist over it, especially in a holiday card.
*For the record, whenever my sister sends me anything, she addresses it to “Mrs. [Skip’s Last Name]”, and yes, she knows full well what my name is, so she pretty much just does it to be obnoxious. But I let it slide because (a) I don’t really care, (b) she’s my sister (and she’s an ass too, sometimes, but I love her), and (c) she’s not the one who got all offended by my calling her children by both her (maiden) and her husband’s last names.
Hyphenated names are not even remotely new. Computer programs should be written to deal with them.
Hyphenated names aren’t any weirder than Jr.s and Sr.s and IIIs and IVs, and computers can deal with that.
Your friend is slightly more pushy than most people are that her name is spelled correctly. I don’t blame her. If she doesn’t insist on it, people are going to spell her name the way they want to instead of the way it’s supposed to be spelled.
I had a friend who wanted to name his first child an Arabic name, which when transliterated the way he’s gotten used to is spelled with an apostrophe in the middle of it. It was a beautiful name, but I’m glad he decided not to because he and his daughter would have had no end of trouble with that.
I hate hyphens. When Ms. PharmBoy and I were first engaged, we discussed it and I told her I’d just rather her keep her name. So, she did, and there is an unexpected benefit - when someone calls and and asks for “Mr. (her last name)”, I just hang up. They obviously don’t know us.
Your colleague’s response was over the top, and I’d respond by dropping her from my Christmas card list.
It will be 2008 in a few days, isn’t it about time that women kept their birth names?
Which brings me to my question.
(background) my brother’s wife kept her name, eschewing my brother’s spectacular last name, and 3 years later is now pregnant. What is the child’s last name going to be?
My take is that female spawn keep the mother’s last name, males, keep the fathers.
Can you be more specific? Because it seems to me that the arbitrary numerical designation “2008” has no import with regard to either social customs or personal choices with regard to names.
Obviously, you are implying that a woman changing her name upon marriage is “old-fashioned.” While not changing has increased in popularity in some countries, it would help to look at some real statistics.
And it also seems that you are implying that a woman changing her name at marriage is necessarily sexist. While this customer could certainly be part of a sexist society and could be implemented in a sexist manner, I don’t think sexism is necessary to such a custom and I think that there are many women who change their names at marriage without sexism as an influence.
Am I to understand that this is a question that you are seriously posing to the SDMB?
I think it’s as workable a solution as any, but like any solution, works best when it’s culture-wide. As a mom of a son with his father’s (but not my) last name, it’s been a bit of a pain in the ass, although people are pretty ready to believe anything these days. I’ve often wondered why an airline, when handed my son’s birth certificate and my ID, and only my first name is anywhere on his birth certificate (because I now have my husband’s, not his father’s nor my maiden names), wouldn’t think I was kidnapping him. (I carry my marriage certificate with me just in case, but no one’s ever asked for it.)
But when I’m referred to as Mrs. Ex’sLastName at parent teacher conferences, it makes me stabby.
They can? Whenever we put a Jr., Sr. or roman numerals the computer decides that these names come alphabetically first. It does the same thing for hyphenated names. So if we have a Bob Smith and a Tom Smith, Jr. in the database. Tom Smith Jr. will appear in the client list before Bob Smith. In fact all Smith Jr.s will appear before just plain Smith. Same thing happens with hyphenated names. What usually happens is that the next time they come in they leave off the Jr./Sr. etc. or the second half of the hyphenated name on their info sheet and then when we search for the name they don’t show up in the list.
I find her reaction a bit bizarre. I have a fairly conventional name and generally have only the reaction of amusement when it is misspelled. The only time I would bother to even think about correcting someone is if there were some kind of official paperwork involved. My birth certificate for example, has “Jr” on it, so I have to have that on my Driver’s license, and the DMV won’t accept insurance as valid that doesn’t have the “Jr” on it. So when my insurance left it off, I had them redo the paperwork. But I was friendly and polite about it. I was also greatly amused by the assumption of people mailing me things when I worked at a science lab that anyone in the science field must have a doctorate. Many pieces of mail addressed to me called me Dr. Jack Davinci. One was even addressed to “The esteemed Professor Davinci”.
Only peripherally related, but one of my pet peeves is that some website forms require that you have a title. What if I don’t want to be a Mr. or a Mrs. or a Ms. or a Dr.?
I have a hyphenated surname and get irritated when people who really should know better screw it up, because I can’t correct them in etiquette matters even politely since that’s against etiquette to do so. I’m not Mrs. HisLastName; that’s his mother’s proper form of address. My name goes on one line, his on its own line, this is not difficult to figure out, especially when I use that format in the return address on all of my envelopes just to drive the point home. (Doesn’t everyone own an etiquette book, she asks naively…)
In all fairness, it also irritated me when a friend addressed a letter to (HisFirstName) and (MyFirstName) MyMaidenName-HisLastName - he did not hyphenate, so that’s not his surname. She did it just to bother him, but it bothered me too.
So instead of taking one man’s name (the father’s) they instead get another man’s name (the maternal grandfather’s)? I mean, you weren’t under the misimpression that somehow the daughters were getting something that was truly from their mother, were you?
As to the OP, I think whoever upthread referred to this hypenutjob as “Mary-Jean-Jones-Moffett” hit the nail on the head. Next Christmas, send her a card in which every space between every word has been replaced with a hyphen.
I recently changed my name, and it thrills me to no end when someone recognizes that and uses my new last name. When they don’t, I shrug, no big deal. I would never cause such ado over a mistake. Next time I saw the person, I might mention it, but if I’ve told you once, that’s enough. To keep harping just annoys the hell out of people.
My previous last name had a “St.” in the front. Amazing how difficult it made things for people. Is it spelled out, is there a space, is there a period, etc. My non-updated email at work just has the last part of the name…who knows where “St.” went. I get mail addressed to St. Lionne, even. It’s funny and a hassle at the same time.
